Elizabeth Hoover
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Inquiry: The Geranium

Q: Do you ever play things for laughs? You know gambol a bit with the focus?

              Misrepresent? Magnify? Miniaturize?

   Do you ever cook, cook up, cook the books, spoil the batter, disguise, doctor, 
             embroider, exaggerate, fake, falsify or fudge? Do you ever misstate, overstate, 
              understate, not-quite state, pad, pervert, prejudice, slant, taint, twist or warp?

   You made the lens, right? Or you made the thing that made the lens, right? I mean made the 
            thing that made the machine that made the lens?

   You made the geranium? Which is garish and misplaced. The geranium and the lens
           and the light on the pavement and the rain that distorts the light on the  

           pavement prior to the lens distorting the distortion of the light that has nothing 
           to do with the geranium.

   You made pabulum? Pap? Poor excuses? Logic sprung like a broke watch? You made
           me, right? And I love the logic of the lens, hide in the logic of the lens, hope that  

           logic counts. Because who knows what counts?

   What counts for you? I have this lens? This lens, shutter, shuttlecock, coat, cloche,
            cloacae, cunning?  I have this brick, palatinate, burgundy, cardinal, carmine,
            cerise, cherry, chestnut, claret, copper, coral, crimson, dahlia and damask? Can I 

            offer you a heliotrope? A coarse, dirty, gross, improper, indecent, indelicate, low
            minded heliotrope.
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  • About
  • the archive is all in present tense
  • Poems & Essays
  • Journalism